Why Is Football So Popular?

Robert Griffin III was knocked out of a game this weekend. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

New York is supposedly a Yankees town, right? Those Yankees, one of the most hallowed franchises in sports history, are in Major League Baseball’s playoffs (again), on the hunt for the team’s 28th World Series title. Last night, they played a critical Game 2 in their Divisional Series against the pesky Baltimore Orioles (they lost). So, the city went crazy for them, right?

No. Not really.

In fact, according to Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand, more denizens of New York City watched the New York Jets lose to the Houston Texans on ESPN’s Monday Night Football (13.8 share versus an 11 share). That’s right, more people in Gotham watched a relatively meaningless Monday Night regular season game than a Yankee playoff game (the football game was “meaningless” only because it was Week 5 of 17 in the NFL, and because the Jets—though they showed some pluck last night—probably aren’t going anywhere this season). Nationally, the eyeball-share news was worse for the Yankees (10 share for the Jets game; 3.6 for Yankees game).

This says less about baseball than it does about our national obsession with football. Football, we all know, is king. The National Football League is a $9 billion enterprise. College football is a nearly $6 billion industry (thanks to Chris Smith for pulling that number). And of course, these revenue figures do not take into account all of the gambling, legal and otherwise (and including fantasy football), that help drive these numbers and the viewership.

But the bottom line is that football, at all levels, has never been more popular.

Which is a curious thing, because the game itself is under siege, primarily because of concerns about what playing it is doing to the brains of its players. Maybe the impact of concussion-related lawsuits and the reports of former players shooting themselves in the heart in order to preserve their brains for future study will be felt someday soon. I’ve argued in the past that mothers may, in the end, determine the fate of football. But they haven’t yet. The game just continues to grow in popularity.

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I spent last fall embedded with a football team while reporting my new book, 4TH AND GOAL: One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream (Grand Central Publishing). I went to every game, and attended nearly every practice and every coaches’ meeting during the season. And I witnessed firsthand both the good and the bad of the game.

The good: That “band of brothers” stuff you hear about football teams? It may be a cliché, but it’s true. It is very cool to watch a group of people work together, striving for a common goal (see: the Indianapolis Colts, who rallied to beat the Green Bay Packers this weekend, winning one for their coach, Chuck Pagano, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia). Football can teach its players and coaches a lot about the fruits of hard work, about being a man and taking responsibility for themselves and their actions. It quite obviously a physical game, but it’s also a mental one (the players and coaches spend an unreal amount of time in classrooms). One player I followed, a nose tackle, told me that it was only on the field where he found total, mind-clearing peace, T.S. Eliot’s “still point in a turning world.” Football, for a good number of its players, is a way out of otherwise very rough neighborhoods, places their peers never get the chance to transcend.

But there seems to be an awful lot of bad these days. The Jerry Sandusky scandal is, of course, very much related to football and the power it has over our universities. Head injuries make headlines nearly every week (promising Washington Redskins rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III, was knocked out of a game this weekend). We now are fully aware of the toll that the game takes on its players. According to the website, nflconcussionlitigation.com, “as of October 2, 2012, there are 3,690 named player-plaintiffs in the 159 complaints [and]…more than 5,200 plaintiffs total” involved in concussion-related lawsuits against the NFL.

But it’s not only head injuries. That player I mentioned above, the one who found enlightenment on the field? He told me that after playing two games on a badly shredded knee, one that should have kept him off the field and one that will, undoubtedly, require a total knee replacement at some time, maybe soon.

And last season, I witnessed one of those frightening moments in games that seem to happen once every week or so. One player—a promising rookie cornerback—while covering a kickoff, honed in on the returner when he was blindsided by an opposing blocker with a helmet-to-helmet hit. The hit was so loud it reverberated throughout the stadium. The kid was out before he hit the ground. The players near him on the field motioned frantically to the sidelines for the medical staff. The player just laid there, arms and legs outstretched, as if he had fallen asleep in the midst of making snow angels.

I was on the sidelines, not 30 yards away from the play. The thought that the player was dead certainly crossed my mind. Complete, sickening silence befell the stadium, as it always does when a play like that occurs. I remember at that moment questioning why I loved this game so much, why I would watch and patronize a sport for which people literally risked their lives. I wondered, briefly, why people would even play it.

The player was carted off the field. He eventually recovered (he had suffered a nasty concussion). Seeing that play from that close will always stick with me.

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And yet, now, I still watch football every weekend. I still love the game. There is no simple explanation for why.

The bad goes along with the good, is inextricable. In that way, the game is not unlike another vastly popular thing in our world: religion.

I am the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Saban: The Making of a Coach," a biography of Alabama head coach, Nick Saban. I'm also the author of “4TH And Goal: One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream," which won an Axiom Award, and “Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for th...